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Talk:Julian Chase/@comment-5430952-20190309204832/@comment-35434444-20190327143928
I think everyone is looking at this situation the wrong way. It's always been odd to me how people take responsibility for their perceptions, their beliefs, their conduct, and their minds in general -- even totally spontaneous emotions they have no control over whatsoever -- but not their bodies. (And when they do take responsibility for them, it's only in the sense of a car or a pet that has to be looked after. Not an inextricable part of their being.) Gen-LOCK seems to buy into wholesale the western notion that the body is a passive and inert vehicle that the spirit rides around instead of an inextricable component of a mind-body continuum. If you compliment a woman on her looks, she may be apt to think of you as shallow. After all, she was mostly just born with them. A total accident. But if you say that she's kind, diligent, trustworthy, or otherwise remark favourably on her personality, she may think you actually care about her as a person even though they came about of themselves too. Do you chose where you're born? Do you choose how parents raised you? Do you choose what ideas you're exposed to as opposed to what idea's you're not exposed to? What culture you absorb? What people you bump into? All of the conditions that define your mind are just as much of an accident as the conditions that define your body. You may feel as though you choose some of these things, but all of your choices are the product of your pre-existing personality, so it always comes back to circumstances beyond your control. You can go back as far as you like, but never reach the point where you sat down and decided who you were going to be independent of who you already were. A person who has never drank alcohol cannot resolve to get rid of a drinking problem they don't have. It wouldn't make any sense. So in the same way, your image of who you want to be is directly informed by, and is in no way alienable from, who you already are. It's all one process. I'm not making a case against free will. (As for my conviction, if you say you have free will, I don't, and if you say you don't have free will, I do.) The point is that your body is as much of a part of who you are as your mind is whether you like it or not. The idea that it isn't is one of the presuppositions of our culture. If you don't have free will, then your body as just as blameless as your mind. You can't act as though it's been running amok and not your mind too. Anyway, the point of this all is that in merging with Nemesis and his teammates, Chase is already more whole than he has ever been. He lost one body but he also gained a new one. I don't think the reason Nemesis became unstable has nothing to do with torture or even uptime. He was simply stuck in the delusion that his old body was real and his holon body was invalid; a pathological identification with the ego that ideological "in control" types like Chase are most susceptible to. Nemesis is a depiction of repressed concupiscence that erupts uncontrollably in projections and unstable moods because consciousness refuses to identify with it; because being responsible and working to protect "tomorrow" and being the hero is just a way of not taking responsibility for the parts of yourself you don't like. At first I thought it might have been Chase's determination that kept Nemesis alive, but it may actually be the other way around; that the degradation into Nemesis' erratic behaviour is really something that Chase is uniquely vulnerable to. (Either way, I'd like to think he served the Union on his own terms.) "Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate." Thus the agent of your downfall is born. As for sleep, that ought to be easy to address. A cybernetic brain is capable of altering personality traits on a whim, recreating a person's memories, and expressing the full range of humans psychological states, so inducing sleep ought to be the easiest thing in the world. All you have to do is change the brainwave patterns. Holon's aren't designed to go to sleep, so it's probably be a lengthy procedure at first, winding down all those organs into a comfortable state of rest simultaneously, but it should be more than possible. It's more likely to me that Nemesis was just suffering from insomnia.